By the way and against advice of counsel I want to say that Lance and Carrie were technically right. Of the four possibilities on the paper, the one that would have moved them in the direction they wanted to go was FORAGE FOR ROOTS. I don’t know why I want to tell you this. I know it doesn’t help my case. I just feel like I owe it to them to let you know. They were right to start digging. But they were only right to start digging in the game, not out in the real world. Not in Kansas in actual ground. I am so so sorry.
I had to fight to keep my bearings, hearing it read out loud; there’s a gap between things I write down and what they’d sound like if I were to try to say them. My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn’t yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly. I’d left out a lot of things I’d wanted to throw in: Chris Haynes, for instance, how I felt like his exit proved there was nothing wrong with living in dreams as long as you didn’t let yourself get carried away. But I had been advised—”in the strongest terms,” they’d said, looking harder at me than most people ever dare, driving the point home as deeply as they could — to make no reference to other players, to anything anyone else had ever done inside the playfield. When I brought up Chris’s name, they’d held up their hands, no-thank-you style: counterexamples might end up being part of my defense, they said; it was “protected,” we could get to all that later if it went to trial. “Don’t get defensive,” they said. They meant Don’t get mad. I tried, but I felt the impulse moving: as I wrote, as I listened. Don’t these people know I’d never hurt anybody again? But I couldn’t let myself think like that. Too much terrain off out there. So I wrote what I wrote, and the clear, level voice of my lawyer presented it to the sterile field of the conference room, and I sat there as still as a stone.
Nobody looked at anybody else for a second. It was like a scene from a dream. And then my lawyer rose and said, Your honor, Lance’s parents aren’t here because they don’t believe my client bears any responsibility for their son’s current condition. She paused for a second, and then she presented the signed affidavits: Lance’s parents had written them and agreed to have them read at the hearing. Copies of the affidavits went around the table until everybody had one, and then we all followed along while the reporter read them into the record. The mood changed; Lance’s parents lived in a world far from the room where we seven had gathered. Their days were spent with terms like long-term care, and in the eternal tangle of insurance forms. They said that Lance had always had problems; they didn’t think Lance’s problems had been anybody’s fault, and besides, he had new problems now. They were more interested in the future than in the past, no matter how hard the past had been. They were putting all that behind them.
There was silence for a minute, and then the judge, a little crudely I thought, nodded toward Dave and Anna, saying, “Well, this makes your case a lot harder to make, I think,” and there were some concluding statements, but none of them really mattered. People rose to speak and sat back down again, but it was pretty obvious that none of it was going anywhere. You could feel something giving up in the air. Eventually the judge said he’d take a brief recess and come back with his decision, and we all went out into the hallway and milled around. My capacity for vanishing into whatever shadows happen to be around is a hard-won and precious skill. Then we reconvened in the side-room, and we listened while the judge read out his ruling, and that was the end of that. I didn’t feel like I’d really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I’d come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.
7
The supermarket is for me what the beach is for other people: it’s eternal. I remember riding there in the car with my mom, once or twice a week every week; that out-of-time hour pushing the cart up and down the aisles, me wandering off to the magazine section when I got bored, always coming back with a copy of Hit Parader in hand. Or Circus. I liked Hit Parader better on principle because it printed song lyrics, but Circus had better stories and a much cooler name. I’d sneak copies into the basket and she’d feign surprise at seeing them when we got to the checkout. Our supermarket outings spanned the years from childhood to adolescence right up until the big change. It was a natural rituaclass="underline" unscheduled, unchanging, traditional. We’re out of coffee, Sean, do you want to go to the supermarket? Yes. Yes, I do.
So I have to say that I miss shopping. I miss it because it’s something I rarely do for myself at all now, and I miss it even though the thing I miss is not actually shopping, but shopping with Mom, when I was young, before anything happened. Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it’s no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can’t miss shopping like you’d miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.
I give a list to Vicky once a week; that’s how I get what I need. Stores where I live are as big as college campuses. But sometimes I’ll get stir-crazy, and I’ll start to resent that I can’t put my life through the same paces everybody else takes for granted. So I’ll go out in the morning, out the door by nine o’clock at the latest, and I’ll substitute the liquor store for the supermarket, since early-riser liquor store shoppers are people who wouldn’t raise their eyes to you if you had a gun pointed at them. Besides which, I have a special place in my heart for the Pomona liquor stores that face the empty boulevards. I grew up in them, kind of: they used to have comic racks.
I needed to stock up on candy. I don’t like asking Vicky to buy as much candy as I actually want to eat; I am ashamed about my candy habit. I will eat it until I feel sick. Once I get to the candy rack I can’t control myself; I buy chewy Swee-Tarts and Red Hot Dollars, and I buy Magic Colors bubble gum cigarettes, which I like even though they don’t have any actual taste at all. I go home and I eat them all straight from the bag while watching The People’s Court or something, and I make noises like an octopus feeding underwater.
I pulled into the liquor store parking lot in the warm early-summer air and I took one of those big yoga breaths the rehab techs encourage you to take when they think your spirits are sinking. I went in, and I brought a good haul of candy up to the counter, about twenty dollars’ worth. When I paid for it the clerk didn’t even look up. I had a memory as I passed the dirty magazines by the front door, but I tamped it down. I looked away toward the sun still coming up over the Carl’s Jr. across the street.
Coming back around the side of the store to the parking lot, I saw some teenagers hanging out in the bed of a white Toyota pickup. They must have pulled up while I was inside. They were smoking cigarettes in the deliberate self-conscious way of smoking teenagers: two of them, long-hairs. They were also openly watching me as I carried my bag toward the car. People like me prefer teenagers to other people. They are not afraid to stare.